In The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp (Random House), best-selling author Lynne Olson shines a light on a remarkable group of women who were punished by the Nazis for their role in the French Resistance and for helping save Jews.

Olson’s new book is largely structured around the stories of four non-Jewish women: anthropologist Germaine Tillion; Anise Girard, then a college student; Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of resistance fighter and future French president Charles de Gaulle; and Jacqueline d’Alincourt, a young war widow and member of the French nobility. All were imprisoned at Ravensbrück for their involvement in the resistance, and all found ways to defy their captors from within the camp—caring for one another and for their fellow prisoners.

Using memoirs, past accounts and interviews with friends and relatives of survivors, the author also describes how women in the camp formed close friendships and helped each other survive. Whenever one of them acquired a lemon, a bit of sugar or perhaps extra bread, Olson writes, they painstakingly divided it among their friends. While discovery meant death, success meant the chance to live one more day.

“We absolutely needed to care for one another. Alone, you were finished,” Girard recounted in the book.

Ravensbrück was unusual among the camps set up by the Third Reich. Not only did it house only women, but it also included a significant number of non-Jews, including political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses and resistance fighters.

Olson, 75, a former consulting historian for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has spent most of her writing career uncovering unsung heroes, focusing in particular on World War II. She talked to Hadassah Magazine about her latest inspiration, why her last three books focused on women and the importance of bringing stories about women to light. This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

What inspired you to write the book? 

The idea came from research I had done for my previous two books, which were about extraordinary women who had played key roles in the French Resistance. Although both the women I wrote about had been arrested by the Gestapo, neither had been sent to Ravensbrück, unlike thousands of their colleagues. I realized that almost none of the many recent books written about women resisters in France focused on the women who ended up there. Even less attention has been paid to the fact that many of them continued to resist the Germans while at Ravensbrück.

How might your book change the perception of concentration camps?

I hope it will call attention to the fact that there was indeed an all-women’s camp. The courage of so many of the women sent there has been forgotten. It’s also forgotten that in the middle of this horror, many refused to behave like victims, instead forming a sisterhood to stand up to the Nazis. Resistance was uncommon in all the camps, but women were just as likely as the men—and, in my opinion, more likely—to defy the Germans.  

Why do you think women from the camp—Jews and non-Jews—created a support network after the war?

The women survivors realized early on that they could only rely on themselves to put their lives back together. All camp survivors, regardless of gender, had an extremely difficult time readjusting to postwar life, but the women made sure they could rely on each other for emotional, physical and financial aid. That wasn’t true of the men, who had not built up the kind of close relationships that the women had formed within the camp.

A number of the Ravensbrück survivors in the book acknowledged the populism, antisemitism and xenophobia in World War II-era France and Germany. Do you consider your book a warning?

Absolutely. The women’s admonition couldn’t be timelier, in light of the appearance today of all those threats in the United States and elsewhere. As one of the women put it, “If such a thing had been possible in Germany, a neighboring, civilized country, how could we think that it could not happen again?”

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Cathryn J. Prince is an adjunct professor in journalism at Fordham University and the author of the forthcoming book For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman.